How verification works

Verification is a one-time check that takes about two minutes. There are three steps:

1. You pay a one-time $4 fee. This covers the real cost of running the identity check. It also does something quieter but more important: it puts a hard cost on every single account, which is what makes industrial-scale fake profiles uneconomic.
2. You photograph your government ID. A passport, driving licence, or national ID card. It must be captured live through your camera. You cannot upload a saved image or a screenshot.
3. You take a live selfie. This is matched biometrically against the photo printed on your document to confirm the person holding the ID is the person it belongs to.

The entire check is performed by Stripe Identity, the identity product built by Stripe. The payments company trusted by millions of businesses worldwide.

A photo of a face proves very little on its own. A government document, checked properly, proves a great deal. Stripe Identity runs several checks on the document you provide:

• Authenticity. The document is checked against a continuously updated database of known fraudulent document templates, so recognised counterfeits are rejected.
• Tamper detection. The barcode and machine-readable zone are decoded and cross-checked against the printed text. Alter a name or a date of birth on the front of a document and the encoded data no longer agrees with it.
• Presentation-attack detection. Checks determine whether a genuine physical document is being presented, rather than a photo of a photo or an image replayed from a screen.
• Expiry. Expired documents are rejected.
• Biometric face match. Facial geometry from your live selfie is compared with the photo on the document to determine whether they belong to the same person. Edited or manipulated face images are detected and rejected.
• Live capture.Because the capture must happen in the moment through your camera, a stolen image of someone else's ID cannot be uploaded from a file.

Documents from over 100 countries are supported.

This is the part most people care about most, so we want to be precise rather than reassuring.

Your ID and your selfie never touch BeyondSwipe's servers. They are captured by Stripe, sent directly to Stripe, and processed entirely by Stripe. They are never transmitted to us, never pass through our systems, and are never stored in our database.

We do not even ask for the data. Stripe is capable of returning details it extracted from your document. Your legal name, date of birth, document number, address. Our systems never request any of it. What we receive back is a single result: verified, or not verified.

We then delete it from Stripe as well. The moment your verification passes, our system automatically instructs Stripe to redact the session. This permanently removes the document images, the selfie, and the extracted personal details from Stripe's records and from the Stripe dashboard. This matters: it means no one at BeyondSwipe can look up your ID later, because after redaction it no longer exists to look up.

Biometric data is never released to us at all. The facial-geometry data used to match your selfie to your document is used by Stripe to produce a yes/no answer and is never shared with us. Stripe retains biometric identifiers for no longer than one year, and you may withdraw your consent to that retention directly with Stripe at any time.

In practical terms, the total record BeyondSwipe holds about your verification is: a reference number for the Stripe session, whether it passed, and when. That is the whole file.

Most dating apps offer some form of verification, so it is fair to ask what makes this different. The distinction is not marketing. It is structural.

The common approach is selfie or pose matching: you copy a pose or record a short video, and it is compared against your own profile photos. That answers exactly one question, is the person in these photos the same person holding the phone? It is a self-consistency check. It proves your photos are really of you. It proves nothing whatsoever about who you actually are.

Document verification answers a different question entirely, is this a genuine government-issued identity, and is this the person it belongs to? That is anchored to a credential issued by a state, which is expensive and criminal to forge.

Concretely, this is what the difference buys you:

• Real face, fake person, is blocked. Someone can pass selfie matching using their own genuine face while their name, age and entire backstory are invented. A document check makes that impossible, because the name and date of birth must come off a real ID.
• Age is verified, not declared. Selfie matching carries no reliable age signal. A document carries a verified date of birth. This is how we keep minors off a platform built for adults, and it is why we do not rely on someone ticking a box to say they are 18.
• Bulk fake accounts stop being viable. Romance-fraud operations depend on running many profiles cheaply. Every extra account here needs another distinct, genuine government document, and another $4.
• Banned users cannot simply come back. On most platforms, someone removed for harassment registers again in minutes. Because removal here is tied to a verified identity rather than an email address, returning is far harder. This is one of the most underrated benefits of verifying properly.
• Anonymity stops being consequence-free. Much of the harm on dating apps depends on the confidence that nobody will ever find out who you really were. Knowing a genuine verified identity exists, subject to lawful process, changes behaviour before anything happens.

We would rather under-promise here than have anyone rely on something we did not actually check. A verified badge on BeyondSwipe means one specific thing: this person proved their identity with a genuine government document and a matching live selfie.

It does not mean any of the following:

• It is not a criminal background check. We do not screen criminal records, sex-offender registries, or court histories.
• It is not a character reference. It says nothing about whether someone is honest, kind, single, or safe to be alone with.
• It does not verify anything they wrote. Their job, education, relationship status and intentions are self-reported and unverified.
• It is not a guarantee of your safety. A verified person can still behave badly. Verification creates accountability; it does not remove risk.

Please read our Dating Safety & Anti-Scam Policy before meeting anyone. Verification makes this a far harder place to run a scam. It does not make you immune to one.

The selfie step involves processing biometric information, facial geometry, to confirm you match your document. We ask for your explicit, separate consent before that happens, and we tell you in advance what is collected, why, by whom, and for how long.

You can decline. If you do, you will not be able to complete verification, and because BeyondSwipe exists specifically as a verified-only community, an unverified account cannot connect with other members. We would rather state that plainly than bury it.

You can ask us to delete your account and its verification record at any time, and you can contact Stripe directly to withdraw consent to biometric retention. See our Privacy Policy for how to exercise these rights and how long each category of data is kept.

Verification can fail for ordinary reasons: poor lighting, a blurred capture, a document that has expired, or a document type we cannot yet read. A failure is not an accusation.

You can retry. If you are repeatedly unable to verify and you believe the result is wrong, contact us at support@beyondswipe.app and a human being will review your case. We cannot see your document, so we may ask you to work with Stripe directly to resolve a document issue.

On refunds: the $4 fee covers a verification that has actually been performed. Where your city pool does not reach 50 verified members within 90 days, our Terms of Service set out the partial refund that applies.

Verification is carried out by Stripe, which maintains independently audited security certifications including PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II, and encrypts personal information at rest using AES-256. Stripe acts as our service provider for this purpose.

BeyondSwipe is operated by 15748666 Canada Inc. Questions about verification or your data can be sent to privacy@beyondswipe.app.